There is barely anyone who illustrated what globalized traffic means and achieves more accurately and entertainingly than Jules Verne, in his satirically tinged, best-selling novel Around the World in Eighty Days from 1874. In its galloping superficiality, the book offers a snapshot of the process of modernity as a traffic project. It demonstrates the quasi-historical-philosophical thesis that the purpose of modern conditions is to trivialize traffic on the global scale. Only in a globalized locational space can one organize the new mobility needs, which seek to provide both passenger transport and movement of goods with a foundation of quiet routines. Traffic is the epitome of reversible movements. As soon as these are expanded into a reliable institution for long distances too, it ultimately becomes meaningless in which direction a circumnavigation of the earth takes place. It is external conditions that lead the hero of Jules Verne's novel, the Englishman Phileas Fogg Esq., and his unfortunate French servant, Passepartout, to undertake the journey around the world in eighty days via the eastern route. Initially, the only reason for this was a newspaper announcement stating that the Indian subcontinent had become traversable in a mere three days through the opening of the last stretch of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway between Rothal and Allahabad. From this, a journalist at a London daily newspaper constructed the provocative article that would lead to Phileas Fogg's bet with his whist friends at the Reform Club. The issue of Fogg's bet with his partners at the club is essentially the question of whether the tourist system is capable of realizing its theoretical promises in practice. The momentous essay in the Morning Chronicle contained a list of times that a traveller would need to go from London around the world to London again – needless to say, the British capital was the location of all locations at the time; a large proportion of ships and commodities embarked on their voyages around the world from there. That this calculation was based on a hypothetical eastward journey was due, alongside the habitual British affinity for the Indian part of the Commonwealth, to a topos of the time: the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had sensitized Europeans to the subject of acceleration in world traffic and created incentives for the dramatically shortened eastern route. As the course of Fogg's journey shows, it was already a completely Wested East that, for all its Brahmans and elephants, was no different from any other curved stretch on a location-spatially represented planet that had been made accessible through traffic.
This is the calculation done by the Morning Chronicle:
| London to Suez via the Mont Cenis Tunnel and Brindisi, by railway and steamship | 7 days |
| Suez to Bombay, by steamship | 13 ″ |
| Bombay to Calcutta, by railway | 3 ″ |
| Calcutta to Hong Kong (China), by steamship | 13 ″ |
| Hong Kong to Yokohama, by steamship | 6 ″ |
| Yokohama to San Francisco, by steamship | 22 ″ |
| San Francisco to New York, by railroad | 7 ″ |
| New York to London, by steamship and railway | 9 ″ |
| Total | 80 days |
‘Possibly 80 days!’ exclaimed Stuart […]. ‘But not allowing for unfavourable weather, headwinds, shipwrecks, derailments, etc.’
‘All included,’ said Fogg, continuing to play – for the discussion was no longer respecting the whist.
‘Even if the Indians and Red Indians tear up the rails?’ cried Stuart. ‘Even if they stop the trains, plunder the carriages and scalp the passengers?’
‘All included,’ repeated Phileas Fogg.1
Jules Verne's message is that adventures no longer exist in a technically saturated civilization, only the danger of being late. That is why the author considers it important to note that his hero does not have any experiences. Mr Fogg's imperial apathy cannot be shaken by any turbulence, for, as a global traveller, he is exempt from the task of showing respect to the local. Following the creation of circumnavigability, the tourist experiences the earth – even in its furthermost corners – as a mere epitome of situations that the daily papers, travel writers and encyclopedias have long since portrayed more comprehensively. This makes it clear why the ‘foreign’ is barely worth a glance to the traveller. Whatever incidents may occur, be it a widow-burning in India or a Native American attack in the west, they can never really be more than events and circumstances of which a member of the London Reform club is better informed than the tourist on site. Whoever travels under such circumstances does so neither for their own amusement nor for business reasons, but rather for the sake of travel as such: ars gratia artis; motio gratia motionis.2
Since the days of the Calabrian Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725), who sailed around the world between 1693 and 1697 out of frustration over family problems, the type of globetrotter without any business interests – the tourist – has been an established figure in the repertoire of modernity. His Giro del Mondo, published in 1699, is one of the founding documents of a literature of globalization on a pure whim. Gemelli Careri likewise adopted the habitus of the explorer who believes that the zeitgeist has given him the mandate to tell those at home of his experiences outside. His Mexican observations and description of the Pacific crossing were still considered ethno-geographically respectable achievements generations later. Even though later globetrotters turned towards a more subjective style of reporting, the liaison between travelling and writing remained untouched into the nineteenth century. As late as 1855, the Brockhaus Conversationslexicon was able to define a tourist as ‘a traveller who has no specific, e.g. scientific purpose for travelling, but only does so in order to have made the journey and then be able to describe it’.
In Jules Verne's tale, the globetrotter has abandoned his profession as a documentarist and become a pure passenger. He presents himself as a customer of transportation services who is paying for a voyage without any experiences that could later be recounted. For him, the circumnavigation of the world is a sporting achievement rather than a philosophical lesson – no longer even part of an educational programme. Thus Phileas Fogg can remain as speechless as an athlete.
As far as the technical side of the circumnavigation of the world in eighty days was concerned, Jules Verne was no visionary by the standards of 1874. With regard to the decisive means of transportation, namely railway and propeller-driven steamboat, his hero's journey corresponded precisely to the state of the art of moving apathetic Englishmen from A to B and back. Nonetheless, the figure of Phileas Fogg has prophetic traits, in that he appears as the prototype of the generalized stowaway, whose only connection to the landscapes drifting past is his interest in traversing them. The stoic tourist prefers to travel with the windows shut; as a gentleman, he insists on his right to consider nothing worth seeing; as an apathetic, he refuses to make discoveries. These attitudes anticipate a mass phenomenon of the twentieth century: the hermetic package tourist, who changes transport means everywhere without seeing anything that differs from the brochures. Fogg is the perfect opposite of his typological precursors, the circumnavigators and geographers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for whom every voyage was accompanied by expectations of discoveries, conquests and monetary gains. From the nineteenth century on, these experience-led travellers were followed by event travellers, who journeyed to remote places in order to enhance themselves through impressions.
Among the impressionistic travellers of the previous century, the cultural philosopher Hermann Graf Keyserling achieved a certain fame with his travel notes: in the years after the First World War, his Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen [Travel Diary of a Philosopher] was a fixture in any serious German private library. The author completed his great tour of the world's cultures in thirteen months as a form of Hegelian experiment – illumination through delayed return to the German provinces.3 Phileas Fogg had a clear advantage over Keyserling, admittedly, because he no longer had to pretend that he was concerned with learning anything fundamental on his journey around the whole. Jules Verne is the better Hegelian, for he had understood that no substantial heroes are possible in the arranged world, only heroes of the secondary. It was only with the idea that came to him on the Atlantic crossing between New York and England, namely to overcome the lack of coal by burning the wooden constructions on his own ship, that the Englishman touched for a moment on the original heroism, giving the principle of self-sacrifice a twist in keeping with the spirit of the Industrial Age. Aside from that, sport and spleen describe the last horizon for male endeavours in the spatially structured world. Keyserling, on the other hand, crosses the threshold of the laughable when, like some belated personification of the world spirit, he wants to travel around the world in order to come ‘to himself’ – his correspondingly comical motto is: ‘The shortest path to oneself leads around the world.’ As his book shows, however, the travelling philosopher cannot have any experiences, only gather impressions.